Privacy Policy

For the use of the website and the provision of services, we collect various types of data, some of which are provided by you as a user and some of which are necessary for the use of the website or arise from the use of the website and/or services. Personal data are individual details about personal or professional circumstances of a specific or identifiable natural person, such as your name, your address, your telephone number, your date of birth, your payment data and your IP address. Your personal data will only be passed on or otherwise transferred to third parties if the transfer is necessary for the purpose of contract processing (for example for payment processing or sending goods via parcel service) or if you have given your express consent. The information is not used for any other purpose and no automatic decision processing will take place.

If we use contracted service providers for individual functions of our offers via this website or would like to use your data for advertising purposes, we will inform you in detail about the respective processes below. We also specify the defined criteria for the storage period.

The following data protection principles apply to the use of our website and other services offered through it (e.g. contact form, registration, web shop):

We protect your personal data by taking all reasonable and necessary technical and organizational possibilities so that they are not accessible to unauthorized third parties. Our website and other services offered through it therefore use appropriate encryption mechanisms for the provision of content and during the input and transmission of data. When communicating by e-mail, we also recommend the use of encryption for confidential information

if the transfer is necessary for the fulfilment of contractual obligations pursuant to Art. 6 para. 1 sentence 1 b) DSGVO;

if we are legally obliged to pass on the data within the meaning of Art. 6 Par. 1 S. 1 c) DSGVO;

if the disclosure of the data is in the public interest within the meaning of Art. 6 para. 1 e) DSGVO or;

if the disclosure of data pursuant to Art. 6 para. 1 sentence 1 f) DSGVO is necessary to protect our legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party, provided that your interests in the protection of your data do not prevail.

If you send us e-mail messages or other messages, in particular comments, or enter them directly on the Website, we will retain such messages in order to process the request, respond to questions and improve the Website, products and services. We delete the data arising in this context after the storage is no longer necessary or limit the processing if statutory retention obligations exist.

If you provide feedback (for example on the Website), we may use and disclose this feedback for any purpose, as long as we do not provide it with your personal data, i.e. anonymously or pseudonymously. The collection of data contained in such feedback and the handling of all personal data contained therein is in accordance with the data protection principles set out herein.

You have the right to ask about your personal data free of charge at any time. Furthermore, you have the right at any time to revoke your consent to the use of your personal data with effect for the future and to request correction or deletion of the data stored by us.

In particular, you have the following rights towards us with regard to the personal data related to you:

Right to access information,

Right to correction or erasure,

Right to limitation of processing,

Right of withdrawal of the consent to processing,

Right to data transferability.

You also have the right to complain to a data protection supervisory authority about our processing of your personal data. You have the following individual rights:

Right to information pursuant to Art. 15 GDPR on the processing of your personal data by us for processing purposes, categories of processed data, recipients or categories of recipients, duration of storage or criteria for determining the duration, right to correction, deletion, restriction of processing or objection to processing, right of appeal to the supervisory authority, information on the origin of the data where applicable and the existence of automated decision-making and, where applicable, information on guarantees pursuant to Art. 46 GDPR in the event of transfer to a third country or international organisations;

Right to immediate correction of incorrect or incomplete personal data in accordance with Art. 16 GDPR;

Right to erasure of the personal data stored pursuant to Article 17 GDPR if the data are no longer necessary for the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed, if a consent granted has been revoked and there is no other legal basis, if opposition to the processing has been lodged and the data pursuant to Article 17 GDPR is no longer required. 21 para. 1 or 2 GDPR may no longer be processed if the data were processed unlawfully, if deletion is necessary to fulfil a legal obligation or if the data were collected in relation to information society services offered in accordance with Art. 8 para. 1 GDPR. This does not apply if the processing is necessary to exercise the right to freedom of expression and information, to fulfil a legal obligation, for reasons of public interest or to assert, exercise or defend legal claims;

Right to restrict processing in accordance with Article 18 GDPR, if you dispute the accuracy of the data (for the period necessary to verify their accuracy), if the processing is unlawful but you refuse to delete the data and instead request the restriction of use, if we no longer need the data for the purposes of processing but you need the data to assert, exercise or defend legal claims, or if you object to the processing in accordance with Article 18 GDPR. 21 para. 1 GDPR, as long as it is not yet clear whether our justified reasons outweigh your justified reasons;

Right to object to the processing of your personal data pursuant to Art. 21 para. 2 GDPR (if the data are processed for the purpose of direct marketing) or pursuant to Art. 21 para. 1 GDPR (if the processing is carried out pursuant to Art. 6 para. 1 sentence 1 e) or f) GDPR, for reasons arising from your particular situation, unless we have compelling grounds for processing that outweigh your interests or the processing serves to assert, exercise or defend legal claims).

Right to data transferability in accordance with Art. 20 GDPR, i.e. to receive the personal data concerning you that you have provided to us in a structured, current and machine-readable format or to transfer it to another person responsible;

Right to revoke consent granted at any time in accordance with Art. 7 para. 3 GDPR. The consequence of the revocation is that from the time of the revocation we may no longer carry out the data processing for the future.

Right of appeal to a supervisory authority pursuant to Art. 77 GDPR. The supervisory authority responsible for us can be found in section 6. j) below. The right of appeal is without prejudice to other administrative or judicial remedies.

Please contact the person responsible for data protection via the contact details provided in Section 2 above to request information and for withdrawal as well as for notification of a request for deletion; the data protection officer will then provide the information immediately or confirm the execution of your request for deletion. A deletion requested by you will then be carried out subject to statutory retention obligations. If a deletion cannot take place completely due to legal storage obligations, we limit the processing of the data concerned and inform you accordingly.

As far as the website or an action via our website or a webinar offered via third party service requires a registration, the basic data for the registration, determined by the respective registration form are transmitted, processed and stored and only collected, stored and used for the use of the website and its services as well as the web shop. In the context of such registration we are also entitled to inform you about changes, additions or new versions of the website, changes of our terms and conditions as well as these privacy statement and additional information provided via the website as well as e.g. about new products.

If you register for the subscription of a newsletter, this registration can take place under indication of the e-mail address without further data. Additional information will not be requested.

We use the so-called double opt-in procedure for sending the newsletter. As part of this process, we first send the user an e-mail to the specified e-mail address. However, the user will not receive a newsletter by e-mail until the user clicks on the link received in the e-mail and has expressly confirmed to us that we should activate the newsletter service. After your confirmation we will save your e-mail address only for the purpose of sending you the newsletter. The legal basis is Art. 6 Para. 1 S. 1 lit. a GDPDR

If at any time you no longer wish to receive newsletters from us, you can object to the newsletter subscription at any time without incurring any costs other than the transmission costs according to the basic rates. A message in text form to the contact data specified in the imprint is sufficient for this. Of course you will also find a unsubscribe link in every newsletter.

The data created by users within the scope of using the website via a login or a newsletter registration are stored on servers operated in our name. However, the server operators are subject to the same data protection standards as we are and are operated in the European Union.

Use of the web shop

If you would like to order in our web shop, it is necessary for the conclusion of the contract that you enter your personal data, which we need for the completion of your order. Required information for the execution of the contracts are marked separately, any further information is voluntary. If you are interested in the purchase of a special licence type, we may request additional information, which are necessary for the approval of the grant of the requested licence type. We process the data provided by you to process your order. For this purpose, we can pass on your payment data to our payment service provider. The legal basis for this is Art. 6 Para. 1 S. 1 lit. b GDPR.

For processing your order, you do not have to create a customer account. Orders are processed as guest orders only. The data you provide will be stored until you delete the data or request for deletion.

If you order a free educational license we ask for your title, name and email address and possibly for a proof that you are currently a registered student or employee of an educational / research institution (copy of student ID card or similar) and use this data for processing the order. The legal basis for this is Art. 6 Para. 1 S. 1 lit. b GDPR.

If you would like to use Efficient Elements for presentations via the XING Premium program, XING will provide us with the following data from your XING account which is required for granting you the use of the software: e-mail, First Name, Family Name, Gender and Link to your XING Profile.

We may also process the information you provide to inform you of other interesting products in our portfolio or to send you e-mails containing technical information.

Due to commercial and tax regulations, we are obliged to store your address, payment and order data for a period of ten years. However, after two years we will restrict processing, i.e. this data will only be used to comply with legal obligations.

To prevent unauthorized access to your personal data, especially financial data, the order process is encrypted using SSL/TLS technology.

Data collected directly in the context of your use of the website

While a purely informational use of the website, i.e. if you do not register or otherwise provide us with information, we only collect the personal data that your browser transmits to our server. If you wish to view our website, we collect the following data, which are technically necessary for us to display our website to you and to guarantee its stability and security (legal basis is Art. 6 Para. 1 S. 1 lit. f GDPR):

When you visit our website and when using the services offered via the website, the server sends one or more cookies – small files containing a string of characters – to the user’s computer or other data processing unit, which uniquely identifies the browser. We use cookies to improve the quality of the website, including to store usage preferences and track user trends.
Cookies can be set in one of the following types:

Transient cookies are automatically deleted when you close your browser. This includes in particular the session cookies. These store a so-called session ID, with which different requests of your browser can be assigned to the common session. This will allow your computer to be recognized when you return to our website. Session cookies are deleted when you log out or close your browser.

Persistent cookies are automatically deleted after a specified period, which may vary depending on the cookie. You can delete cookies at any time in the security settings of your browser.

Third-party cookies are cookies that are set by third parties and can be either transient or persistent cookies.

You can set your browser to notify you when a cookie is sent. This opens up the possibility of either accepting or rejecting a cookie. The information collected and analyzed is used to improve the services and the website, to personalize the web experience, and to allow easy login to permanently set login cookies.

We may use the services of third parties to evaluate the efficiency of the website and services and to determine how visitors use the website and or the services and, where appropriate, to provide a personalized user experience when evaluating cookies. The website may use cookies provided by third parties for this purpose. The information collected by the provider includes the pages visited, navigation patterns and similar data. This data enables us to find out which product information is most interesting for users and which offers users prefer to view. Furthermore, we do not exclude the possibility that we transmit anonymous usage data for market research purposes. Although we may have commissioned third parties to log the data originating from our website, we have control over how this data may or may not be used. The cookie itself does not contain any personal data, but if you provide personal data when visiting the website and do not delete the cookie from your browser after providing this data, the provider collects the non-personal data stored in the cookie (such as the number of visits to the provider) and stores and processes this anonymously.

Data collected in the context of the use of the website by analysis tools (WebAnalytics) used by us with our website:

We use Google Analytics to analyse and regularly improve the use of our website. We can improve our offer and make it more interesting for you as a user. Google Analytics is a web analysis service of Google Inc. “(“Google”), which uses cookies to analyse your use of the website.

The information generated by the cookie about your use of this website is usually transferred to a Google server in the USA and stored there. However, by activating IP anonymisation by us on this website, Google will previously reduce your IP address within Member States of the European Union or in other states party to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. For exceptional cases in which personal data may transferred to the USA, Google has submitted to the EU-US Privacy Shield, https://www.privacyshield.gov/EU-US-Framework. The legal basis for the use of Google Analytics is Art. 6 Par. 1 S. 1 lit. f GDPR.

On behalf of the operator of this website, Google will use this information to evaluate your use of the website, to compile reports on website activity and to provide the Internet use.

You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser, however please note that if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website. You can also prevent Google from collecting the data generated by the cookie and relating to your use of the website (including your IP address) and from processing this data by Google by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available under the following link: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en

We have included YouTube videos in our online offer, which are stored on http://www.youtube.com and can be played directly from our website. No data about you as a user will be transmitted to YouTube if you do not play the videos. Only when you play the videos will the above data be transmitted. We have no influence on this data transmission.

By visiting the website, YouTube receives the information that you have accessed the corresponding subpage of our website. In addition, further data is transmitted. This is independent of whether YouTube provides a user account through which you are logged in or whether no user account exists. If you are logged in to Google, your information will be directly associated with your account. If you do not wish to be associated with your profile on YouTube, you must log out before activating the button. YouTube stores your data as user profiles and uses them for purposes of advertising, market research and/or demand-oriented design of its website. Such evaluation takes place in particular (even for unlogged-in users) to provide demand-oriented advertising and to inform other users of the social network about your activities on our website. You have the right to object to the creation of these user profiles, and you must contact YouTube to exercise this right.

We process personal data about you for the purpose of your application for employment, insofar as this is necessary for the decision to establish an employment relationship with us. The legal basis is § 26 Paragraph 1 in conjunction with Paragraph 8 Sentence 2 BDSG. Furthermore, we may process personal data about you insofar as this is necessary to defend against legal claims asserted against us in the application process. The legal basis is Art. 6 Para. 1, letter f GDPR, the legitimate interest is for example a duty of proof in a procedure according to the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG). Insofar as an employment relationship exists between you and us, we can process the personal data already received from you for the purpose of the employment relationship in accordance with § 26 Paragraph 1 BDSG, if this is necessary for the execution or termination of the employment relationship or for the exercise or fulfilment of the rights and obligations of the interest representation of the employees resulting from a law or a collective agreement, a company or service agreement (collective agreement).

We process data in connection with your application. This may include general information about you (such as your name, address and contact details), details about your professional qualification and school education or details about professional training or other information you provide us in connection with your application. We process your application with the support of StepStone, so that on our behalf possible recipients of the data entered by you are also StepStone Deutschland GmbH and its subcontractors, which you can find under the following link:https://www.stepstone.de/ueber-stepstone/rechtliche-hinweise/allgemeine-geschaeftsbedingungen/#processors

We store your personal data for as long as it is necessary to make a decision about your application. If an employment relationship between you and us does not materialize, we may also further store data, insofar as this is necessary to defend against possible legal claims. The application documents will be deleted two months after notification of the rejection decision, unless longer storage is required due to legal disputes.